Jason Leopold: “It feels like I’m fighting insurgents right now”

Comparing his own mundane personal problems to battling killers in Iraq would have earned him some serious chickenhawk flak if he was in favor of the war.

Lucky for him he’s one of the good guys.

You know what good guys get to do? They get to bend the rules. Not break them, mind you. Just bend ’em a little bit:

We’re in a time when a lot of things are happening in this country, and no one wants to talk about it. Certainly nobody wants to talk about it on the record, so getting that information sometimes, in what I was revealing, [requires] bending the rules. I know other reporters out there have done it. [With] me admitting it and coming out and saying this is what I did, I would expect editors down the road to put me under a microscope, and I absolutely welcome that. Right now we have reporters embedded with the White House, Democrats, Republicans. I think the rules of journalism … I’m not saying break ’em, but if it’s for the public good, bend ’em a little bit.

Speaking of which, Seixon has a new post up in which he writes, oh so tantalizingly, “I am in the process of getting the phone number of the person who made the death threat against me. Apparently my phone carrier is more helpful than the local police. Go figure.”

He accused Leopold yesterday of having made the call, which is a pretty outrageous accusation to level against a former cokehead who did time for grand larceny and was once fired, as he tells it, for threatening to “rip a reporter’s head off.”

But that’s an insurgent for you. No matter what you do, they just keep coming.